The Dress

A meme from 2015 where the internet was bitterly divided on the color of the dress, with some adamant is was blue-and-black and others adamant it was white-and-gold.

The confusion stems from the role that Illuminants play in determining an object’s color. Humans use Color Constancy to ‘subtract’ the color of the Illuminant from the perceived color to figure out the actual color of the object. However, when the color of the illuminant is not clear (such as in the dress’s photo), the internet had to make assumptions about how the dress was lit, and of course, assumed very different lighting which led to greatly differing perceptions of the dress’s color.

Had somebody been wearing the dress in the photo, the individual’s skin tone would have given a strong clue as to the color of the illuminant, and there would have been no disagreement about the dress.